Logiciel Libre

Here’s a Public Service Announcement. Kroger Hi-Tech Mint Waxed Floss is the best. Period.

This floss balances the perfect amount of strength, slipperiness, and cleaning power. It doesn’t cut into my fingers. My teeth don’t slice it. It smells nice. It’s made in the U.S.A. It’s way cheaper than Glide, or any other flosses that claim to be “high tech”.

This is a bit of a departure from most of what I blog, but staying in shape is also part of my life. As such, I recently ran the Vancouver Marathon with my bro, and we had tons of support from the family along the way (especially Eva!).

At the end of the marathon, Forest and I had a random encounter with some nice folks from a company called Saxx. They claimed they had some fancy new underwear that would eliminate chafing, you know, “down there”. I agreed to try on a new pair and tell them how they fit, in exchange for the underwear.

And the result is online for all to see (safe for work if your coworkers don’t mind lots of talk about balls). Fast-forward to about the four-minute mark to see Forest and I.

So then, here’s my shout out to Saxx. They make a great pair of undies!

Encryption is a nice security feature that makes it significantly harder for someone to mine your data if, for instance, your latptop is stolen.

If you install Ubuntu with the alternate installer disk, encryption takes only a few keystrokes. Here are two tutorials with screenshots.

If you only need to encrypt a single file, just right-click on the file in the File Browser and click “Encrypt”.

Thanks to Sam for the idea.

int k = 0;
k = k++;

After both lines execute, what is k equal to?

(more…)

Mifos’s beloved director George Conard will be giving a talk on Mifos at the 2008 O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland, Oregon.

The phrase double bottom line refers to having a bottom line besides just profit.

See you there!

As seen on Planet Fedora…

  [adamm@snax ~]$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a)\
{print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
79 svn
68 vim
57 cd
35 ls
32 pwd
25 ant
20 s
19 mysql
19 find
12 mv

“s” is aliased to “cd ..”.

That is all.

Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) knows a thing or two about fostering a geeky volunteer community. A desire to do well at my current post of “Mr. Open Source” on the Mifos project has led me to try and learn some lessons from people like Jimmy. Here are two crucial points gleaned from an interview with him on FLOSS Weekly:

• small group dialogs are best, too many people on one problem ends in voting/groupthink
• build a system that supports bees and and handles wasps (my verbage)

I’ve been enjoying strolling through the FLOSS Weekly archives; a collection of one-on-one interviews with key players in FLOSS. Here’s a quote that really speaks to why FLOSS is something to pay attention to:

“Free as in Freedom” is a really important concept. That is, technology really as to be free in some important ways if people are to have political freedom.

- Eben Moglen, speaking on the GPL version 3 during FLOSS Weekly interview.

Bryan recently pointed out that a popular tourist “festival activity” in Beijing is “sunstroke prevention”.